1. NTUC Income (“Income”), one of Singapore’s largest insurers, has over 1.8 million policy
holders with total assets of S$21.3 billion. The insurer employs about 3,400 insurance advisors
and 1,200 office staff, with the majority located across an eight-branch network.
On June 1, 2003, Income succeeded in the migration of its legacy insurance systems to a digital
web based system. The Herculean task required not only the upgrading of hardware and
applications, it also required Income to streamline its decade-old business processes and IT
practices. Until a few years ago, Income’s insurance processes were very tedious and paper-
based. The entire insurance process started with customers meeting an agent, filling in forms and
submitting documents.
The agent would then submit the forms at branches, from where they were sent by couriers to the
Office Services department. The collection schedule could introduce delays of two to three days.
Office Services would log documents, sort them, and then send them to departments for
underwriting. Proposals were allocated to underwriting staff, mostly at random. Accepted
proposals were sent for printing at the Computer Services department and then redistributed. For
storage, all original documents were packed and sent to warehouses where, over two to three
days, a total of seven staff would log and store the documents.
In all, paper policies comprising 45 million documents were stored in over 16,000 cartons at
three warehouses. Whenever a document needed to be retrieved, it would take about two days to
locate and ship it by courier. Refilling would again take about two days. In 2002, despite
periodic investments to upgrade the HP 3000 mainframe that hosted the core insurance
applications as well as the accounting and management information systems, it still frequently
broke down. When a system breakdown did occur, work had to be stopped while data was
restored.
Additionally, the HP 3000 backup system could only restore the data to the version from the
previous day. This meant that backups had to be performed at the end of every day in a costly
and tedious process, or the company would risk losing important data. In one of the hardware
crashes, it took several months to recover the lost data. In all, the HP 3000 system experienced a
total of three major hardware failures, resulting in a total of six days of complete downtime.
That was not enough. The COBOL programs that were developed in the early 1980s and
maintained by
Income’s in-house IT team also broke multiple times, halted the systems, and caused temporary
interruptions. In addition, the IT team found developing new products in COBOL to be quite
cumbersome and the time taken to launch new products ranged from a few weeks to months.
At the same time, transaction processing for policy underwriting was still a batch process and
information was not available to agents and advisors in real-time. As a result, when staff
processed a new customer application for motor insurance, they did not know if the applicant
was an existing customer of Income, which led to the loss of opportunities for cross-product
sales, as staff had to pass physical documents between each other and there was no means of
viewing an up-to-date report on a customer’s history on demand. Furthermore, compatibility
issues between the HP 3000 and employees’ notebooks caused ongoing problems, especially
with a rise in telecommuting.
All this changed in June 2003, when Income switched to the Java based eBao LifeSystem from
eBao Technology. The software comprised three subsystems - Policy Administration, Sales
2. Management and Supplementary Resources — and fulfilled many of the company’s
requirements, from customer orientated design to barcode technology capabilities, and the ability
to support changes in business processes. Implementation work started in September 2002 and
the project was completed in nine months. By May 2003, all the customization, data migration of
Income’s individual and group life insurance businesses and training were completed.
The new system was immediately operational on a high-availability platform. All applications
resided on two or more servers, each connected by two or more communication lines, all of
which were “load balanced.” This robust architecture minimized downtime occurrence due to
hardware or operating system failures. As part of eBao implementation, Income decided to
replace its entire IT infrastructure with a more robust, scalable architecture. For example, all
servicing branches were equipped with scanners; monitors were changed to 20 inches; PC RAM
size was upgraded to 128 MB; and new hardware and software for application servers, database
servers, web servers, and disk storage systems were installed. Furthermore, the LAN cables were
replaced with faster cables, a fiber-optic backbone, and wireless capability.
In addition, Income also revamped its business continuity and disaster-recovery plans. A real-
time hot backup disaster-recovery center was implemented, where the machines were always
running and fully operational. Data was transmitted immediately on the fly from the primary
datacenter to the backup machines’ data storage. In the event of the datacenter site becoming
unavailable, the operations could be switched quickly to the disaster recovery site without the
need to rely on restoration of previous day data.
Moving to a paperless environment, however, was not easy. Income had to throw away all paper
records, including legal paper documents. Under the new system, all documents were scanned
and stored on “trusted” storage devices - secured, reliable digital vaults that enabled strict
compliance with stringent statutory requirements. Income had to train employees who had been
accustomed to working with paper to use the eBao system and change the way they worked. As a
result of adopting eBao Life System, about 500 office staff and 3,400 insurance advisors could
access the system anytime, anywhere. Staff members who would telecommute enjoyed faster
access to information, almost as fast as those who accessed the information in the office.
This allowed Income to view a summary of each customer over different products and business
areas.
As a result, cross-selling became easier, and customer service could be improved. Simplified
workflows cut policy processing time and cost by half, and greatly reduced the time required to
design and launch new products from months to days. Additionally, the systems allowed for
online support of customers, agents and brokers
